NetApp has collaborated closely with Red Hat for many years to deliver enhancements to the Red Hat portfolio solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the Red Hat OpenStack platform. These enhancements enable NetApp to continually deliver a more seamless experience to its customers.

As we prepare to head home, we first want to take a moment and extend our deepest thanks to all those whose extraordinary efforts made this possible. To those who planned, manned the booth, shared with an audience, built relationships, worked behind the scenes, and everything in-between - thank you. You made this possible.

My three decades of selling in the tech sector have been divided between leading direct sales and technical teams and leading channel or partner sales and technical teams. In that time, spent on both sides of a fence between direct and partner sales, I’ve seen a wide range of expectations and beliefs of what a channel or partner rep does for a living. I’ve seen channel reps derided as relationship managers, event planners, overlays, or hangers-on. AndI’ve seen partner sales professionals fully respected by their direct sales peers as part of the selling team. How they are seen is, in part, a function of how they approach their role.

The ways in which tech sector OEMs and their partners navigate the simultaneous demands of exploring and exploiting will determine their success in helping customers manage a transition of applications and workloads into and out of multiple cloud environments so their data is where they want it when they want it. As tech companies exploit many new technologies being explored, what is required from leaders, and often missing, is the conviction and absolute clarity of what must be exploited over different points in time.